If on a winter’s night a cyclone

Thomas Jones

Reading Amitav Ghosh’s book, I realised something that I feel naive for not having thought of before: trying to convince ‘climate sceptics’ of the reality of anthropogenic climate change is a waste of time. By ‘climate sceptics’ I don’t mean the apparently growing number of people who don’t believe in climate change because they were freezing cold this winter and trust what Donald Trump or Nigel Farage tells them on Fox News or the BBC. I mean the people who stand to gain from the Trump administration’s America First Energy Plan, which will increase US dependence on fossil fuels: more fracking, more coal-mining, more pipelines. There’s nothing to convince them of: nobody who has worked in the hydrocarbon business can be in any real doubt that carbon dioxide causes global warming – a fact first demonstrated more than 150 years ago – or that burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide. They already know all that, but it doesn’t bother them. On 28 March, Trump signed an executive order – ‘On Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth’ – to rescind the modest legislative advances against climate change made in the last years of the Obama administration.

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Letters

Thomas Jones writes that China is ‘gradually reducing its dependence on coal’ (LRB, 18 May). China has a population almost half a billion larger than that of the EU and the US combined. Such is the size of its energy economy that Jones is right to say it is ‘massively expanding’ its investment in renewables. But at the moment solar and wind power account for just 1 per cent of China’s generating capacity; if one includes hydro and nuclear power, the figure rises to 10 per cent. China plans to double the share of renewables in its energy mix so that by 2030 the respective figures might be 2 per cent and 20 per cent. The fossil fuels that currently account for 90 per cent of China’s mix (67 per cent of which is coal) will account for 80 per cent in 2030 (coal’s share will fall slightly).

But crucially, over that period, China plans to double its entire capacity. There will, in other words, be an immense absolute increase in the consumption of fossil fuels in China in the coming years, and of coal in particular. China’s coal plan alone will double global emissions by 2030. All this is in perfect accord with the Paris Agreement, which strengthens the permission China has always enjoyed under international climate change law to emit as much as it wishes.